Will, faith, power, encore!

Main menu

Monthly Archives: May 2010

This Sunday the people on the Canary Islands celebrate. Everyone will be eating typical Canarian potatoes with a nice ‘mojo’ sauce, honey rum, fish prepared in water from the ocean, almogrote, and everything typical the locals like to eat and drink.

Of course there are little markets all over the place selling local products and to make everything even better the Monday after the party is a holiday as well!

The crisis has hit Spain as well. Unemployment has skyrocketed and about 30% of the population is without a job. At least officially because in Spain there are quite a lot of people working all kinds of jobs without paying taxes.

The most recent measure to improve the economy was a strange one. All civil servants will have to accept a pay cut. Depending the salary they will lose from 5 to 15 percent. The measure will be in effect in June or July.

Such a big cut in the salary is strange, but whats far stranger is the complete lack of information about this cut back. No one knows if the cut back regards the entire salary, the brute of net, extra hours, extra additions, holiday allowance, etc. Also it’s unclear how much will be the cut back… 5%, 15% or something in between… no one seems to know and there is no official place to get this information. I don’t have any problems, but my girlfriend does and with her a lot of civil servants. Unrest is clearly growing.

Even though I now live in Spain I like to continue to collect Dutch coins. Luckily I’ve my family back home in Holland who don’t mind to every now and then pass by the post office and get me some special edition coin. The rest like the yearly sets I just buy online.

But now the royal Dutch mint has started a very strange action. To ‘honor’ the past they will create some replicas of ancient coins. Undoubtedly make some extra money, but the result seems highly undesirable. In the future it will be harder to know if a coin is ‘real’ or a replica. These coins are even made by the same organization. Fortunately the replicas will be made ??from silver, so the confusion will only arise with coins that were originally silver.

What is going to be the next step? Create replicas of entire collections of Dutch coins? Replicas that cannot be told apart from the real thing. I think it would be a wise choice if the royal Dutch mint focused on the current and the future and leave the past alone.